Mr Davey objected to the over-simplified way such incidents were often portrayed.

"It makes me sick, the rank hypocrisy of the adult world, pointing their finger and standing on their little pulpits. But we've all done it ourselves when we were kids.

"So I feel in no position at all to stand up and take these kids to task, especially living in a world where it's generally deemed to be cool to be tooling around in fast cars and drinking flash beer. It's pushed down our throats, far more than it was in my day, and we wonder why they crash off the road drunk."

"I totally disagree. I've been to many accidents and always treated them as serious until proven otherwise. On the way there you're always going, 'I hope they're not dead, I hope they're not dead'. We never treat anything lightly."

He said the boys had acted like "dorks" when emergency services arrived, and had no visible signs of injury.

"The ambulance guys looked at them and couldn't find anything wrong and believed that they were just being, as I say, dorks.

"But he was taken to hospital as a precaution; so it's not accident fatigue, it's just the circumstances that surrounded the whole injury. At least they saw sense to take him to hospital to get him checked out."

The two boys who weren't taken to hospital were breath tested and found to be over the legal alcohol limit for adults, Mr Hunter said.

Both claimed to be unable to remember who was driving.

"They've suddenly got amnesia, supposedly," Mr Hunter said.

"It's very frustrating. We just want to get to the bottom of what happened, why it happened and who's responsible."

Should they fail to identify who was behind the wheel, both boys could be charged with driving with excess breath alcohol.

Police were yet to speak to the boy in hospital, but they were confident he was not driving.

"St John Ambulance officers treat all incidents and all patients they attend to very seriously and equally. We attend acute incidents with lights and sirens, and are focused fully on treating our patients."